Best Year Ever

"We are so glad we decided to entrust our billing to Ulrich Medical. We had our best year ever with Ulrich Medical doing the billing! Thank you for all you do."

Beth Long, ARNP, Milan Surgery Center

Conserving valuable time and space

“TCC has been instrumental in conserving valuable time and space dedicated to documentation and maintenance of medical records… The customized templates give us the advantage of consistency as well as speed which leads to greater quality of care and education for our patients.”

- Evelyn M. Jones, M.D. dermatologist

Highly Recommended

“I would highly recommend their (Ulrich Medical Billing’s) services. We have contracted them for a little over a year and have seen a drastic improvement in our cash flow, since a month of starting with them.”

- Cheri Hampton, P.T., MHS

Power and Flexibility

“The power and flexibility of the system is truly impressive. Your staff—without exception—is top notch. We found everyone to be well informed, patient, and eager to assist. You’re a friendly and professional group and we look forward to a long relationship.”

- Brian F. Scott, M.D. family practice

TCC Simplifies Everything

“In a busy practice, you have to look up things constantly and it’s a nightmare locating paper charts. TCC simplifies everything – all of the information is right in front of you. You don’t have to search for it and more than one person can be in the patient chart at a time.”

- Mark Sexton, RRT Office Manager

The EHR: Interoperability

Interoperability: improving continuity of care

Interoperability is the main focus on Meaningful Use Stage 2. The goal is to improve the quality and efficiencies of healthcare. Participating providers electronically exchange key clinical data with clinics, imaging centers and laboratories. Establishing connectivity to a health information exchange (HIE) creates tremendous research capabilities for health researchers, resulting to capturing and tracking health trends and improve outcomes.

At the HIMSS Conference, Fazad Mostashari, MD, visits UMC’s exhibit, “Physicians EHR Reporting to a Central Cancer Registry.” He and other visitors saw step-by-step how the clinical data is transmitted in real-time, from documentation of the initial patient encounter in Team Chart Concept to submitting the cancer data to the Kentucky Cancer Registry.

“Fundamentally, we have to reduce the cost and complexity of interfaces through standards and implantation guides,” stated Mostashari. “The vendors have to really be able to do Stage 2. It’s a huge step up—huge step up on interoperability. Vendors are really going to have to step up to the plate in terms of being able to achieve the Stage 2 expectations for true vendor-to vendor coded, clinical structured, documents being able to have kind of ubiquitous protocols with security in place.”

“This project is laying the ground work for electronic reporting, not only in Kentucky, but across the U.S.” said Ulrich. “We were honored to have ‘first in the nation’ status to participate in such a cutting-edge project.”

Because the CDA format was in its infancy when the collaboration began, UMC had a positive opportunity to have an input from a vendor perspective. As the standard evolved, adjustments to the data sent in the CDA were required, including:

Developing the proper communication protocols to ensure secure deliver of the protected health information; and

Software development to transmit the CDA document in the requested HL7 message.

"A key thing for our office is that we have an EHR and a vendor that worked with us and helped us through this entire process,” said Robin Stamper, practice manager for Paducah Dermatology.

The successful model proves that it is technically feasible for state cancer registries to receive standardized cancer data from physician EHRs.

“From the KCR’s perspective, we can anticipate receiving reliable, high quality data from physicians using TCC, that fulfills our reporting requirements,” said Eric Durbin, director of Cancer Informatics at the KCR.

“UMC has been a great partner,” said Durbin. “We could not have been successful in this project without their support. Their hard work and dedication has helped draw national attention to our highly successful collaboration.”